As data centers deploy more virtualized servers to consolidate infrastructure and reduce TCO, providing scalable networking performance within a virtualized environment becomes a significant challenge for IT administrators. The Intel® Ethernet Converged Network Adapter X520 and Intel® Ethernet Converged Network Adapter X540 families support industry-leading features that are accelerating the performance and implementation of 10 Gigabit Ethernet in a virtualized environment. As part of Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) for Connectivity (Intel® VT-c), Intel® Ethernet Converged Network and Server Adapters support PCI-SIG* Single Root I/O Virtualization and Sharing (SR-IOV), which offers the ability to create multiple lightweight virtual functions (VFs) per physical adapter port. These VFs are lightweight PCIe* functions that contain all the resources necessary for data movement but have a carefully minimized set of configuration resources available to host operating systems. They are capable of providing 10 Gb Ethernet connectivity to virtual machines (VMs) within a virtualized operating system framework, such as provided by Microsoft Windows* Server 2012 with Hyper-V*, Linux* KVM and Xen*, and VMware ESXi* 5.1.